If you've been following us over on Twitter, you may have caught a glimpse of our controller. Enter the DVD player. 📀🤩 Playing video data from a filmsey plastic disk? Who needs that? That's why we decided to save our planet 🌍 from one extra peice of e-waste and upcycle the metal casing into a base station for our robot. All of the video circuit and DVD tray system has been removed leaving a spacious interior for our computer system of choice; the Raspberry Pi - it would have been cool to have an extendable cup holder though: talk about artistic merit 😂. This is also the housing of the communication module, a large battery 🔋 salvaged from a tablet and a charge port complete with changeover system to handle the input of power. We are also going to include a screen 📺 for extra controls - unfortunately this will have to be a later edition though as our current screen has packed up for good. On top of these things, we have also included a copy of our add on port; this will provide a convenient platform for testing our add-ons. This will be especially important before the robot is fully online 🤖⚡ and we are trying to divide up out workload. For analogue movement input, we enlisted the services of EBay and purchased a cheap USB gaming controller. This connects to the base station and is translated into HEX data before being broadcast to the Robot. The final input controls available on this system are the hardware switches and LEDs. With the current programming setup, the LEDs demonstrate the status of the Bi-directional communion with the green🍏LED indicating a handshaking success and a yellow🌟 LED to indicate that no response was received. A red🌶️ LED indicates a serious error either server or client side. As for the switches, one controls master server power ⚡, one toggles the add on from local to remote. The final one has a purpose that is yet to be decided.
All in all, it is nice to have a tangeble section of the project even if it is lacking a functional screen and has a few rough edges still
to be rounded off.
Catch you next time 😛